LAURA Veirs has picked Don't Lose Yourself as the first single off her new album, Saltbreakers. It is an apt choice for the 33-year-old American singer-songwriter, whose personal life has been experiencing turbulence.

"I've undergone a big transition. I ended a long relationship in Seattle and moved to Portland, and while I didn't necessarily think I'm gonna write another record', I'm a somewhat orderly person and at the outset I'd decided that I'd write an album a year, and I thought, Well, get to it'," says the Colorado-born Laura, who plays Fibbers in York on Easter Sunday.

"I went through a lot, and it was a hard thing to go through, but songwriting helped me pull through it. Music really can help people in times of change and struggle."

What makes you reveal your private life, not only on an album but each night in concert, Laura?

"It's brave and a little tough. I'm being confronted with it in my writing, and when I go out on tour I'll be confronted with it every night, but the nice thing is that songs are mutable and fluid and I like that about my songs. So it's not about saying This is a song about breaking up'," Laura says.

"A song can go anywhere and they need to be open enough to be interpreted in the present moment or they'll become static."

Yet songs take on another dimension once listeners bring their own experiences to them.

"That's why people get so attached to certain records, and it's often the one they hear first. It's the discovery, and the attachment of that discovery, but then you change as a writer and they say, Why did you change?'."

A writer inevitably changes as circumstances alter.

"I was consumed with the break-up and so I had to confront that, but then I was also confronted with something new fairly quickly - a new relationship - so that consumed me too, and I had to look at the wider picture. Don't Lose Yourself addresses that.

"I'd read a book by the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, called Blindness, a year before I wrote the song. I'd jotted down some words; it was a fantastical story about the end of the world and how the structures of society are quite fragile, and it doesn't take much to break them down. So I was thinking a lot about destruction and renewal on this album."

Laura is at pains to point out Saltbreakers is not a break-up album in the vein of Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks or Beck's Sea Change.

"It has that break-up aspect to it, but it also has a new relationship in there, so I don't know if anyone will compare it with those records though I do like both of them!"

Laura will be on the road for four months this year, a month in Europe, another in America and then a couple in the autumn when she will open for fellow Portland musicians The Decemberists.

She will be playing with her regular band - pianist Steve Moore, bass and keyboards player Karl Blau and drummer Tucker Martine - so don't be misled by their change of name to The Saltbreakers.

"I got fed up with the old title, The Tortured Souls. It was supposed to be ironic, and people got it, kind of, but we got sick of saying we're not tortured," Laura says.

What is a saltbreaker?

"It's an ocean wave, an old term for it, but it could be anything. Waves have such great differences within them. One can destroy you, another can absolve you; they can smash you but they also bring food, fish, and exploration and wonder. The sea is so mysterious; that's why it fascinates me."

Through her albums Carbon Glacier, Year Of Meteors and now Saltbreakers, this daughter of a Pacific North West geologist and marine biologist has addressed the natural world.

"It's the wonder that draws me in. It's not even that I want to hold on to it. I just want to observe it," she says.

"We can take it and write about it or we could just ignore it, but it's a rich source of material for songwriters, and of course I want to protect that world.

"I'm not a pioneering campaigner, I'm a songwriter, but I am an environmentalist, though I don't have a political thread to me. Maybe I will in the future, but it's more of an intellectual thing. I'm coming at it from a different angle."

Indeed she is, as she gives the perfect summation of her ever distinctive songwriting.


Laura Veirs and The Saltbreakers, Fibbers, York, Sunday; £10 advance, £12.50 door.

Charles Hutchinson